The Daily Christian – Nice vs. Kind
Zola Levitt once said on his T.V. program that the concept of being nice was not part of the culture of the ancient Jews. I inferred at that time that he also meant that the Bible itself had no such notion either. I remember being rather agitated by this. You see I was a bit prideful about being nice. It was the one thing that I could do quite well, so it rubbed me the wrong way to be told that it wasn’t even a biblical concept.
Just so we are all on the same page, to me, being nice is equivalent to conducting oneself in a pleasant and courteous manner. I do believe that was probably how Zola had seen it too. However, there is an amenable factor to nice that often goes unnoticed. This aspect of nice is what gets those who do recognize this component all up in arms about it. They feel that you’ll never get anywhere demonstrating it. Linda Kaplan Thaler and Robin Koval, two successful women in the advertising world, who, in their book The Power of Nice, explain how to advance in your career all the while being nice, would probably disagree with this.
There are, of course, some who go to extremes in showing this characteristic of nice. We have a name for them. We call them doormats. Leaving these extremists to the side, the truth is that without nice the world would simply fall into complete disarray—even more so than it already has. For we’ve all met that person; the one who shows absolutely no interest in being agreeable. For this person, it is their way or no way at all. They are easily spotted. They are the ones with the single digit friend count on “the Facebook.” It should not come as a surprise that this is not the way a believer should behave. Unbeknownst perhaps to Zola this aspect of nice is biblical.
In Ephesians 5:21, Paul tells us to submit to one another. The word, submit or submitting (KJV) here means “to subordinate; reflex. to obey.”[1] In other words, there should be some desire to be accommodating to the other members of the community of Christ. We should not always be looking out for what we want. We should look to the cares, needs, and wants of the other person.
Obviously, we should object if the other person desires us to do something sinful, foolish, illegal, etc. If we don’t object, we are isolating this command from the rest of the Bible. Some women, for example, take the idea of submitting to one’s husband (Ephesians 5:22) to such extremes that they in effect turn their husbands into idols. Submitting to ones husband becomes their religion. But again these are the extremes where most of us don’t live.
And this brings us to a place where I wish I spent more time. This place is called being kind. Most people throw “being kind” in with the definition of nice. However, kindness has a moral attribute to it that nice never quite achieves. Sitting with a grieving person on a Saturday afternoon when you have a million other things that you could and should be doing, giving a pair of broke college kids a free serving of fries, or pulling over to help an elderly couple with car trouble are all examples of kindness that I have witnessed in my own life. Unlike being nice, showing kindness takes a bit more effort—more time. In other words, it takes a bit more of ourselves. It is unselfish. When Paul tells us “be ye kind one to another,”[2] this is what he means. It is what I would like to show more of, because for me, nice comes easy, but kind is much harder. But both are biblical concepts of which we should strive.
[1] James Strong, Strong’s New Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible(Iowa Falls, Iowa: Word Bible Publishers, Inc., 1986), hupŏtassō, 5293
[2] Ephesians 4:32 (Old King James Version)
Just so we are all on the same page, to me, being nice is equivalent to conducting oneself in a pleasant and courteous manner. I do believe that was probably how Zola had seen it too. However, there is an amenable factor to nice that often goes unnoticed. This aspect of nice is what gets those who do recognize this component all up in arms about it. They feel that you’ll never get anywhere demonstrating it. Linda Kaplan Thaler and Robin Koval, two successful women in the advertising world, who, in their book The Power of Nice, explain how to advance in your career all the while being nice, would probably disagree with this.
There are, of course, some who go to extremes in showing this characteristic of nice. We have a name for them. We call them doormats. Leaving these extremists to the side, the truth is that without nice the world would simply fall into complete disarray—even more so than it already has. For we’ve all met that person; the one who shows absolutely no interest in being agreeable. For this person, it is their way or no way at all. They are easily spotted. They are the ones with the single digit friend count on “the Facebook.” It should not come as a surprise that this is not the way a believer should behave. Unbeknownst perhaps to Zola this aspect of nice is biblical.
In Ephesians 5:21, Paul tells us to submit to one another. The word, submit or submitting (KJV) here means “to subordinate; reflex. to obey.”[1] In other words, there should be some desire to be accommodating to the other members of the community of Christ. We should not always be looking out for what we want. We should look to the cares, needs, and wants of the other person.
Obviously, we should object if the other person desires us to do something sinful, foolish, illegal, etc. If we don’t object, we are isolating this command from the rest of the Bible. Some women, for example, take the idea of submitting to one’s husband (Ephesians 5:22) to such extremes that they in effect turn their husbands into idols. Submitting to ones husband becomes their religion. But again these are the extremes where most of us don’t live.
And this brings us to a place where I wish I spent more time. This place is called being kind. Most people throw “being kind” in with the definition of nice. However, kindness has a moral attribute to it that nice never quite achieves. Sitting with a grieving person on a Saturday afternoon when you have a million other things that you could and should be doing, giving a pair of broke college kids a free serving of fries, or pulling over to help an elderly couple with car trouble are all examples of kindness that I have witnessed in my own life. Unlike being nice, showing kindness takes a bit more effort—more time. In other words, it takes a bit more of ourselves. It is unselfish. When Paul tells us “be ye kind one to another,”[2] this is what he means. It is what I would like to show more of, because for me, nice comes easy, but kind is much harder. But both are biblical concepts of which we should strive.
[1] James Strong, Strong’s New Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible(Iowa Falls, Iowa: Word Bible Publishers, Inc., 1986), hupŏtassō, 5293
[2] Ephesians 4:32 (Old King James Version)
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